Booting floppy disk images from a USB thumb drive

A few days ago I needed to run a manufacturer's hard disk utility, prior to returning a dying drive under warranty. The software was provided as an ISO, or a floppy disk image.

It felt like a shame to waste a CD to burn less than a few megabytes of data, so I wanted to use the floppy disk image. The only problem is that my PC (like most new PCs these days) doesn't actually come with a floppy disk drive (which is good – I don't like those things).

What I did have, was a USB thumb drive and after a bit research I managed to boot the floppy disk image from it. A little more research resulted in a simple system to boot one of several floppy disk images stored on a USB drive.

The article below describes the steps required to achieve this using a Linux system.

Required software

The following tools will be required:

LILO

mkdosfs

SYSLINUX

Debian packages are lilo, dosfstools and syslinux.

Partition the USB drive

Unless you want to dedicate your USB drive to the task of booting disk images, you will want to create a separate partition for this purpose (and use the rest of the disk for other things). The image partition will need to be in FAT16 format. It will also need to have the boot flag set. This is what my image partition looks like in fdisk:

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdf1 * 1 12 47213 6 FAT16

The remainder of this article assumes that the USB drive is accessible using /dev/sdf, and that the FAT16 partition created above is /dev/sdf1.

Conclusion

References

Disclaimer

The information above is accurate to my knowledge, however I provide no guarantees to this effect and consequently accept no liability whatsoever for any bad things that may happen as a result of the reader using this information in practice. Use at your own risk. Oh, and backup your data while you're at it.